and i wonder
if you miss your old friends
once you’ve proven what you’re worth
yeah i wonder
when you’re a big star
will you miss the earth
and i know you would always want more
i know you would never be done
‘cuz everyone is a fucking napoleon
———————————
I didn’t recognize this song when Ani first started playing it the other night. And as she got to the lyrics and i know you would always want more I leaned over to Beth and said, “Do you realize she’s about 5-6 songs in and I haven’t heard a single bad word out of her mouth?” Beth said, “True… guess we’re about to find out -” and right then Ani sang fucking napoleon..
We waited outside the theater to see if we could get her autograph or a photo or something, because that’s really my thing lately – getting autographs of famous people (I need to take a count how many I got this year) – but her tour manager came out and said the baby had just woken up and Ani normally doesn’t do autographs anyhow and at best we’d get a photo of her climbing into the tour bus if we hung around until about 1am.
Mark introduced me to Ani. I’ve mentioned him a time or two here, but a minor recap goes like this: I had 2 friends in Seattle. One was Molly who I met while working at a sign-shop (and have recently found again on the internet! Yay! More about her in another post…), and the other was Mark who I met while waiting 3 hours to get tickets to a Tori Amos concert. Mark was going to Western Washington University up in Bellingham and, strangely enough, he was also friends with this other guy I had found on ICQ when looking for potential friends in Washington State. The odd thing was, this guy on ICQ lived in Spokane and ended up actually being a former roommate of Mark at WWU – Anyhow, he was going for a visit to Bellingham and even though I had only talked to Mark briefly in the Tori line, I made the 3 hour drive and crashed at their dorms. (What can I say… I was 20 and fearless.)
Mark and I dated for a few months… when he wasn’t at WWU he lived on Bainbridge Island, which made it much easier to visit him. I did make a few trips up to Bellingham though, and since it was within an hour or two, one weekend we decided to head up to Vancouver, Canada. I’m pretty sure it was the Vancouver trip when Mark introduced me to Ani via Living in Clip – a 2 disc set of live songs. Later that summer Ani played at an outdoor festival and I found myself in a field with a bunch of very butch lesbians who would scream louder every time Ani said a bad word, and they were especially loud when she said the c-word.
Anyhow, I’ve fallen out of touch with Ani’s music over the years, and I don’t talk to Mark at all anymore, but the concert was a nice dose of Ani and a simple sprinkle of nostalgia.
For those keeping track of my schedule, next on the agenda is the So You Think You Can Dance tour next Friday… I WILL be hanging out at the stage door for that one! (Which reminds me, I need to figure out where that will be at this venue because it’s HUGE.)


